A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World - Chapter 2

For every Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking in the world, there were probably hundreds of people who could have achieved similar heights of knowledge if they had the right questions and resources. Albert Einstein had spent many of his early years struggling to even get by before he had finally had the time and insight to begin making scientific discoveries, catapulting his position from a dropout struggling to get by in life to a world-renowned physicist that practically discovered half of the foundation of modern physics.

This was because he found the thing every researcher and scientist desperately needed in order to truly make discoveries: he had found a question. Alice, upon seeing a freaking magical box quantifying her attributes, had her own question. What the heck is this unscientific thing, and how could something this absurd possibly exist?

Today, the girl who, over the course of her rather short life, had always wondered if she would ever find a question and had finally found one…

Was lost in the woods, hungry, and a bit dehydrated. Her singularly unimpressive athletic abilities were finally coming back to haunt her.

While she would have loved to explore whatever the System was and what was going on, what she needed now were more basic things - food, water, and a basic idea of where she was. She had a certain hope that if magic existed in this world, there might be a solution that was… well… magical, but she figured that was probably just wishful thinking.

As she moved, she paid careful attention to her surroundings, looking for a single trace of anything useful. All of these trees meant that there had to be some form of water here, or at least there had been in the recent past, right? Even if all the trees were creepy and dead, if they had been dead for too long, surely they would have withered away, right?

But there was nothing here. In the three hours she had been walking, she hadn’t seen a single living thing besides herself, nor any hints of one. The forest was completely, eerily, unnervingly dead and silent. This made Alice more and more nervous as she walked - now that she was paying close attention to where she was going and her surroundings, every snap when she crushed a branch, every squeal of surprise when she misjudged where something was in the dim moonlight and walked into it, and every clumsy step she took seemed louder.

Something must have happened in this forest, and Alice didn’t know anywhere near enough about the outdoors to figure it out. The only thing she had determined for sure so far was that there were an awful lot of dead trees in the area, and finding routes over/around fallen trees was a huge pain in the butt. Finally, Alice realized that she was probably an idiot for trying to find her way around this creepy forest in the middle of the night, and began trying to look for a place to lay down for the night.

She hadn’t seen much in the way of cover so far, and she was getting cold. After another few minutes of walking, however, she finally found something that looked vaguely promising - a huge tree trunk had fallen into a bunch of other trunks, and for whatever reason, the inside of the tree trunk seemed rotten and, more importantly, partially hollow inside. The remaining space in the tree could probably fit ten of her inside pretty easily, and the shelter looked like it would probably do an okay job of keeping the wind away. Almost gasping with relief at the thought of laying down and sleeping for a while, Alice stumbled towards the hollow tree trunk - and nearly died for her carelessness.

An animal that looked like a raccoon leapt out at her. Its body was covered in horrific, bleeding pustules, and one of its legs had fallen off. Fresh blood was slowly dripping out of the wound, and it was hard to tell what color its fur had originally been. However, Alice was certain that whatever was wrong with this thing, she wanted nothing to do with it.

Alice was now wide-awake, and immediately began sprinting away at full speed, desperately trying to outrun whatever animal this thing was. Its claws still looked sharp, and Alice was pretty sure this thing had some sort of disease. Who knew whether it could infect humans too?

After sprinting for a few minutes, Alice realized the animal had stopped chasing her, and fell to the ground, gasping and panting for breath. She tried her best to remain alert, looking around for any other animals, but the unnerving silence of the dead forest had returned: nothing around her moved or made a single sound, not even the rustling of leaves. There was nothing to differentiate one direction from another, and no way to see save for the moonlight.

Her head started pounding, and Alice started to quickly realize something - despite the fact that her sweat hadn’t cooled down yet, she was starting to feel freezing cold. She frowned, and her vision started to blur as waves of blackness started eating away at the edge of her sight. She touched her forehead with a growing sense of fear and suspicion, and confirmed that it was blazing hot.

Oh crap. She had hypothesized earlier that another planet would have totally different diseases that her immune system had absolutely no defenses against, and hoped that the RPG system might somehow protect her from that, because she had no way of taking precautions against diseases right now. But less than a few hours after she got to this world, she already had a fever. Wasn’t this way too fast? Was she really going to die like this? Without figuring out anything at all about how she had gotten to this world or what the System was, or even seeing magic after her status screen claimed it existed?

But her eyes felt so heavy, and she was desperately trying to stay awake so that she could at least drag herself somewhere where she might have a lower chance of getting eaten while she was unconscious, but she just couldn’t stay awake. Faintly, as she felt dizzier and sleepier, she faintly saw the words

Then everything went black.

* * *

Her world was fire. Burning waves of heat and cold crashed through her body, and she felt like she was dying, like she was in hell, and it hurt it hurt ithurt ithurtithurtITHURT. The pain was endless, sweeping through her as she crawled forward, and it was as if her blood and her heart had become fire, scorching her from the inside.. She needed water, but there was nothing but fire and dead trees. She passed out from the pain only to wake up again almost instantly, the reality of the two blurring as she kept crawling, because she needed water.

An eternity later, the forest had transitioned from gnarled, dead trees to living ones and suddenly there were the words from the RPG system again, telling her about something, but it didn’t compare to the burning in her body.

I’m going to die here, she thought, not for the first time. She wanted to cry because of the pain, but her body wouldn’t produce tears anymore, and the world swam in hues of black and dribbled like oil in a canvas painting in her vision. Was this everything she would amount to on this world? She had only been here a day and she was already going to die. There was nobody nearby, and she was sure that nobody came to the creepy dead forest if there was even a civilization on this planet. Her vision was too fuzzy for her to make out her surroundings in any great detail, anyway. It was the end.

Her arms collapsed, and she stopped crawling - her body didn’t have the strength to move anymore, and whatever illness she had contracted seemed to be drying up her body at an unnatural rate. Every time she tried to move it felt like she was crawling through molasses, her body slow and unresponsive. She just couldn’t summon the willpower to move another inch. Slowly, like a kite without wind, her body sagged into the dry, dry dirt. Her vision was swimming in and out of clarity, and the heat in her body was growing worse and worse. However, as her thoughts grew fuzzier, she swore that, for just a moment, she saw…a stream of water?

Alice’s thoughts cleared for just a moment, and with the last gasp of strength, she desperately crawled forward. If she could cool down the heat she might be able to survive! A few minutes later, inch by horrible inch, she crawled farther, until she flopped into a small stream. Even stream might have been the wrong word - if she had been standing up, the water wouldn’t have even come up to her knee, and it wasn’t even wide enough for her to fully lay down in.

However, right now this tiny little trickle of water represented her last hope to live. She had nothing to hold water in and no way to start a fire, so she had neither the tools nor strength to boil the water. She had to hope that there was nothing wrong with this water - if there was, she was dead. But right now, this was her one and only hope to live. With her body partially in the water, she managed to lower her face into the water and began to drink.

A few minutes later, the heat and pain from the sickness came again, and the horrifying feeling of her bones and muscles being set on fire followed on its burning heels - she had the strength to scream now, but she managed to, just barely, hold the need to scream inside of her throat; if she attracted a different animal and it attacked her in this state, she would die. It was the worst pain she had ever felt in her life - now it felt as if her bones, her blood, her organs were all made of acid.

However, the pain came wave after wave, and finally, she screamed in agony, no longer able to force down the pain with just mere willpower. Her voice echoed throughout the silent forest, sounding as thought a demented banshee was heralding the end of the world - the pain was so horrible that she didn’t care if an animal came and attacked her anymore - dying couldn’t be worse than what she was experiencing right now.

Her body folded again from the pain, and this time she landed face-down in the stream. The coolness from the water didn’t help the pain. However, her screaming stopped, if only because she couldn’t breathe anymore. Moving more by instinct than logic at this point, her body spasmed again and she sucked in half a breath of water, before her body shuddered and began a hacking cough, which was rapidly cut short as her body ran out of oxygen. With her last shred of willpower, she managed to drag her head back out of the water and roll over, coughed out the liquid in her lungs and sucked in another breath of air as she spasmed in the little stream.

The pain was unrelenting, and she screamed again, and again, and again. After an unknown period of time, her throat was raw and bloody, and her body was hot and heavy, and she managed to drink another few mouthfuls of water but couldn’t cool the heat inside of her body. The sun set, and she couldn’t scream any more, but the pain and acid and fire inside of her body still failed to relent.

For the entire night, the pain was unrelenting, and she only managed to flop over and suck in a few mouthfuls of water a few more times - she wished she would pass out and make the pain stop for a while. Wasn’t the human body supposed to stop functioning whenever pain became unbearable? But for some reason her body refused to fall unconscious.

Alice could feel her brain changing, felt the weight of something settle inside of her ribcage, behind her heart. Slowly, the horrifying heat and feeling of acid tearing away at her being started to fade away, and a feeling of comforting warmth began to build up inside of her body instead.

Her limbs, by this point, had stopped flailing about, and were reduced to simply twitching in response to the pain. The fire that had consumed her body began to roll towards her heart and brain, and the pain everywhere began to fade. After a few hours the pain faded completely, leaving behind a flickering ember of warmth pulsing behind her heart. After a moment, she started to lose awareness of it as it faded away from her awareness. Alice opened her eyes, trying to remember when they had closed.

When she opened her eyes, a long list of notifications from the system rang out, starting with the one she had gotten sometime yesterday while her initial fever had been kicking in and destroying her ability to process the world around her.

Alice spasmed, trying to process what was going on. She was alive? She was alive!

What the heck had just happened? She was reasonably sure that no more than a day or two had passed – while she was incredibly hungry now, it didn’t seem like her body was suffering from the effects of malnutrition yet, just on the edge. In that case… had she just fought off a disease from this planet in just a day or two? Maybe this was the effect of her ‘strengthened immune system’ from the {Outworlder} perk? What the heck did ‘increased support from the System’ mean? What was Mana Poisoning?

Finally, she realized that the {Baptized by Broken Mana} achievement indicated that what she had just fought off wasn’t actually a disease – it seemed to be some sort of byproduct of mana. Was ‘broken mana’ the reason that the forest area she was in seemed so dead and lifeless?

Also, what the heck was the [Explorer of Magic Class] supposed to do? She had no magic attribute! She pulled up her status screen, preparing to really let the System have a piece of her mind, but when it came up, several things were quite different.

The first thing she noticed was that the set of glitch-signs under the ‘skills’ list was gone and had been replaced with the word ‘English.’ The system was… updating its information or something? However, even though the system had apparently updated its information and figured out what the English language was, it still seemed to have no awareness of any of her other skills that she should have built up during her life.

Alice also realized that even though she had checked her status screen before, there was now an {Achievements} category that had both the {Outworlder} achievement and the {Baptized by Mana} achievement. Her body was also warm... much warmer than it had been moments ago. It was subtle, but she could definitely feel it. However, bizarrely enough, enough of cooking her alive, it felt... right. She had no idea what to make of that.

Finally, her [Magic] attribute had increased from ‘0’ to ‘5.’ Although it looked fairly pathetic when she realized that her other stats were all, at a bare minimum, well into the double-digit range, if her earlier endurance bonus from walking through the wilderness was any indication, all attributes could probably be improved with work and training. If she was willing to spend time exploring magic, she could probably get the stat up to a non-pathetic point eventually, although she had no idea how long it would take.

She also wondered what a ‘primary class’ was, and how it was different from a secondary class. Her status screen listed primary classes as being ‘0/5’ right now, so primary classes were obviously a limited resource, while secondary classes, as far as she could tell, might be totally unlimited in number. If that was the case, primary classes might be strengthened in some way? Of course, Alice had no clue what a class did at all, and so she had no idea whether making her two classes primary classes was a good idea or a terrible one. Finally, she closed her eyes and sighed.

Screw it. She accepted both classes as primary classes and hoped she wouldn’t regret this later. In this foreign world, what she needed was survival ability now, and Survivor sounded pretty useful for the purpose of not dying. Furthermore, Explorer of Magic sounded exactly like something she wanted to do; exploring the reality-ignoring, physics-defying nonsense that this world had to offer. Furthermore, if she could figure out how to throw fireballs, that would certainly improve her survival ability by several orders of magnitude. If this was suboptimal or somehow problematic…. Well, necessity was the mother of bad decisions, and right now she needed to not die instead of optimize for a distant future.

While she still didn’t know for sure whether or not other humanoids lived in this world, the fact that the system had mentioned ‘survivors’ and ‘ungifted’ indicated that the answer was probably yes. However, if there were people here, they had grown up with an RPG system that, based on her understanding of it so far, allowed (probably) supernatural increases in body strength, mental ability, and, possibly, prevented any decay whatsoever of knowledge and skills even if they weren’t used for decades. At least, that was how things worked in video games – character skills never decayed or went down.

Hmm… the ‘Survivor from another world’ perk might be some sort of catch-up mechanism, which would explain why the benefits of the mana perk continued on into infinity while the ‘Survivor from another world’ perk stops being useful for attributes above 120. In that case, would an average inhabitant of this world have attributes of around 120?

Of course, she could also just be wrong about the {Outworlder} perk being a catch-up mechanism. She had no idea how strong or weak the {Outworlder} perk was, and it might help strengthen her above, or below, the average strength of this world. It did have a rarity next to it, but rarity might not necessarily correlate to how useful a perk was.

She did assume that there was probably some correlation between higher rarity and usefulness, but the {Baptized by Broken Mana} achievement seemed to give better bonuses than the ‘Survivor from Another World’ perk when it came to magic. Perhaps it was also related to the actual difficulty of gaining the achievement? Or how specific it was? She hadn’t done anything besides wake up in a foreign world in order to get the Survivor achievement, but she had actively survived a difficult process in order to get the Mana achievement. Or something.

She decided to put her thoughts on the matter to rest for now – she had too little information, and no way to find out more.

Alice sighed and took a look around. The area of the forest she had stumbled into in the middle of her mana-poisoning induced haze was much less dead than the place she had entered this world, with the occasional sounds of animals bumping into trees and even birds chirping in the distance, flagrantly ignoring the fact that biologically it should have been pretty much impossible for a totally different planet to evolve the same lifeforms and no don’t think about that!

Alice hurriedly snapped herself back out of the endless spiral of trying to figure out if any of this made sense at all and instead sighed in contentment. Yes, this definitely made sense. Birds in another world that produced almost the exact same sounds as birds at home. Trees. Floating letters that popped up whenever she said the words ‘status screen’ out loud. Logic? What was that?

Unlike in many RPG’s, there didn’t seem to be a difference in stats when it came to a level zero and a level one. Come to think of it, the system hadn’t known what the English language was at first, so maybe this world was ‘bugged?’ Alice gave the trees a suspicious glance. If the level system was bugged, could she get stuck in the ground or in trees? That seemed… absurd, but so did a levelling system. I’ll just have to hope for that one.

Alice scanned her status screen again, trying to look for any changes, but besides ‘Explorer of Magic’ and ‘Survivor’ being listed as ‘level 1’ under her primary classes section, she couldn’t find anything else different. She shrugged and closed her status screen - she suspected she would have plenty of time to figure out the nature of the status screens and the RPG system that governed this dimension if she didn’t die, so right now she needed to get moving.

The bigger question, for now, was where on Earth - ahem. Where in this dimension was she? She looked around, seeing the world clearly in sunlight for the first time. Trees and birds chirped in the sunlight, and the only landmarks she could see were the familiar patch of unnervingly dead trees in the distance and the creek she had nearly drowned in earlier. If it weren’t for the status screen, she could have easily mistaken this place for Earth.

If she didn’t know where she was, perhaps she should just follow the creek - odds were decent that if she just followed the water far enough, she might find a river, which would hopefully eventually find civilization. Alice knew that in ancient eras rivers tended to be where most villages and early cities were founded, due to their easy access to water. Even in the modern era, it wasn’t a bad bet, and it was the only landmark she had for now.

She took a step forward and found that her body felt far weaker than before. That shouldn’t be right, though, should it? In the first place, she had recovered from… oh.

Alice suddenly realized she hadn’t eaten in at least a day, possibly two or three. She was very, very hungry, but had been too distracted by the pain of mana poisoning earlier, and was still trying to process what had happened afterwards, so she had lost track of time. For that matter, she doubted she was properly hydrated either.

She lowered her head back into the creek, and praying that she didn’t get some sort of horrible disease, noisily slurped down water until her throat stopped hurting. Then, she scanned the area around her, and tried to identify all of the plants and animals. Birds - edible, but hard to catch. I don’t have any confidence in hitting one even if I throw rocks or make a basic slingshot, and they don’t have much meat on them. I think while I was delirious I saw a rabbit, so I might be able to hunt one of them if I make a snare… how do you make a snare?

Umm… Alice looked at all of the brown and red leaves of the plants around the river, and realized she had no clue what was and wasn’t poisonous. In the first place, who in the modern world actually bothered learning wilderness survival? Alice was far more proficient at identifying the packages of food in a supermarket than identifying plants in a forest.

Besides, the plants and animals of this planet, even if they looked like the ones on earth, had to be different somehow. The air here had seemed pretty normal, but she had contracted mana poisoning from somewhere, and besides the air she hadn’t interacted with much so far. If everything in the world breathed in mana, a good chunk of the wildlife was probably evolved to either handle or use the mana in some way, right? Even if she knew how to identify plants from Earth, it might be useless here.

Alice finally turned to the river itself and noticed something that filled her with hope: even though the water was somewhat shallow, lazily swimming towards the center of the river was a fish about twice the size of her hand. While it wasn’t large, where there was one fish there would probably be more. Alice quickly grabbed a fallen tree branch and began tearing off the extraneous bits, and after perhaps five minutes she had in her hands the beginning of mankind’s most primitive but incredibly useful hunting tool: a spear. Frowning, she poked the other end of the spear and confirmed that it was nowhere near sharp enough to be used for anything stabbing-related.

Perhaps instead of calling it a ‘spear’ she should have just called it a stick.

Alice began checking some of the pebbles in the area, and eventually managed to find a somewhat sharp edge on a stone that had broken in half. Turning back to her makeshift spear, she took the stone and began hitting the edge of the branch, trying to sharpen the edge of the stick into something that resembled a spear.

Five minutes passed this way, with a girl mercilessly beating a stick with a rock.

Ten minutes…

Fifteen…

Finally, after thirty minutes, Alice had a… spear. Yes, a very powerful and mighty… extremely sharp… somewhat sharper than average… pointy stick. Alice held it up and inspected it, and was pleasantly surprised to hear the system give her two notifications.

“So you can recognize Woodworking and Survivor levels, but you can’t recognize {pathfinding} or {trying to find civilization} or {lost in the woods and dying, please send help}? Who makes the rules for Skills? I mean, the last two would be pretty ridiculous, but I could definitely see a Skill like {Pathfinding} or {Wilderness Navigation} or something along those lines existing.”

Alice sighed and turned back to the river. For now, she was unlikely to find any answers. Soon, she located another fish, and began phase two of operation ‘Avoid Starving to Death.’

She stopped moving as much as possible, holding her pointy stick over the shallow stream and preparing to stab downwards. Soon, the fish began swimming closer to the side of the stream she was positioned on, lazily drifting down with the current. Closer…. Closer…

Stab! Alice stabbed the river, perfectly missing the fish. Frightened, the fish darted away, disappearing in a flash of scales and light as it zoomed into the distance. “Fuck,” Alice muttered, watching dinner escape. How had she missed? The fish had been right below her pointy stick…

Belatedly, Alice realized the problem. The surface of the water caused light to refract slightly, meaning that anything she was looking at in the water was slightly lower than what her eyes would tell her. Since she had mistaken this, given the fact that her pointy stick wasn’t entirely straight she had just barely missed the fish, instead of spearing it down the middle as she had meant to.

Part of this could also be attributed to her rather low accuracy in the first place, which had exacerbated the problem, but she chose to blame it entirely on the light! If I was able to think of light refraction problems afterwards, I should have been able to remember it before. Who knows when another fish will come, thought Alice. If she had been a little less careless, she could have been cooking the fish for lunch instead of quietly cursing by the creek’s side. She sighed, sitting by the creek’s edge and dangling her bare feet into the water. She was so hungry…

Come to think of it, even if she caught a fish, how would she start a fire? Rubbing two sticks together? That was supposed to work, right? It was worth a shot.

She began daydreaming of convenience stores. In America, it was incredibly easy to find food as long as one had a little bit of money. If she could just step into a convenience store or a restaurant and buy some waffles. Blueberry waffles with maple syrup sounded delicious right now… She felt a pang of homesickness.

Finally, after a few minutes of indulging in a pointless fantasy, Alice realized she was wasting time and stood up, trying to focus again. If I want to find food or civilization, my best bet is probably the river. I can periodically check the water to see if I can find any fish to eat, and I might also run into other small animals of prey that I have some chance of successfully hunting and killing. In addition, villages are much more likely to be established near a river, because it would make watering crops or retrieving water for drinking purposes easier. Assuming there are even humans on this planet, at least, she thought.

She began following the little stream downriver, which soon joined a few other streams and started to become a properly large river. As she walked, she noticed there were plenty of other lifeforms that were bizarrely similar to Earth’s flora and fauna here - although the original odds of finding humans or similar creatures on another planet should have been basically zero, this world seemed perfectly happy throwing such logic back in her face. Even though she was still hungry and cold, she was determined not to accept her death.

Alice snorted, not wanting to deal with the system right now. However, she felt as if her will had been fortified compared to a second ago - the change was slight, and Alice wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t just her imagination, but she felt as if it was easier to cling onto her beliefs and determination than it had been a few moments ago.

She absently wondered if one single point in willpower actually made this large of a difference – maybe this was actually just the placebo effect? But perhaps it was much easier to feel as if the point of willpower made a difference compared to all the points she had gained in endurance, due to the fact that willpower was less impacted by the fact that she hadn’t eaten in over a day and was physically exhausted.

Finally, Alice found more fish in the river. Problematically, they also swam much farther beneath the water’s surface-Alice could barely even see the deepest fish. If she fell into the river at this point, she could easily be carried off by the current and drown, meaning that this was actually a risky endeavor.

Alice began by finding a shallower part of the river where her pointy stick could reach the bottom. Then, she gathered several sticks that could be used as kindling and a few thicker sticks that could be used to sustain a fire for a longer period of time. Then, she patiently lowered the ‘spear’ into the water, making sure that light refraction would no longer be a problem. Afterwards, she waited patiently, ignoring the rumbling of her stomach.

Finally, a fish wandered underneath the pointy stick. Stab!

With a single stab, Alice gained two levels and a weakly struggling fish. She lifted the stick out of the water, careful not to let the thrashing fish slide off the stick in the process, and then quickly strode back over to the pile of sticks. Then, she grabbed a stick and began rubbing it against another stick, hoping to cause enough friction to start a fire.

After only a moment, though, she suddenly felt as if her preparations were somehow… insufficient. She frowned, trying to figure out where this idea was coming from, before finding a stick that had a hole in it and another stick that was around the same size as the hole. She placed one of the sticks into the other and began spinning the stick, trying to make the force of friction start the fire. Bizarrely enough, she felt that her first idea of just rubbing two sticks together would be harder than this method.

Five minutes later, her arms felt like they were going to fall off. Aside from that, no real progress had been made. Alice was starting to worry that she wouldn’t be able to get anywhere with this, either because she was doing it wrong or because her arms simply couldn’t provide sufficient force to the sticks to actually cause a fire.

She finally set down the sticks and flopped onto the dirt for a while, panting as she pondered whether this was what dying felt like. She didn’t have any way to gut or descale the fish, she couldn’t start a fire… even though she had caught the fish, she didn’t have the ability to process it! If she died like this right after successfully spearing her first fish, she would curse this planet on the way to the afterlife and then make an appeal to Darwin to fix the obviously broken process of natural selection here!

Finally, Alice remembered something critical - theoretically, she had magic. Extremely questionable magic that she had no idea how to use, but maybe she could start a fire with magic somehow? She closed her eyes, trying to figure out how to use magic. In most novels, magic had a lot to do with imagination, so she tried imagining flames as much as she could, imagining the stick catching fire…

After ten minutes of concentrating, she felt incredibly stupid, and exactly zero progress towards starting a fire had been made. Apart from that, she just felt tired, hungry, and frustrated.

At least the fish had stopped flopping around. Alice stuck her face into the river and took a long drink of water - even though she should purify it somehow, perhaps by boiling it, she had no water container and no clue how to make a container here. And even if she did, she had no fire anyway. If she got a disease from the water and died, it would be pretty typical of her luck thus far, and she was thirsty enough that she could barely think. If she was going to die either way, she may as well just go for it and pray, right?

She eyed the dead fish. Was she desperate enough to just bite into it and hope for the best? Not quite. Yet.

Finally, she thought back to earlier, when she had been trying to start a fire. She had initially been planning on rubbing two sticks together and hoping for the best, but right before she started she had suddenly had the hazy idea of trying to spin a stick inside of another stick in order to start a fire instead. In the end, she failed, but she had no clue how to start a fire in the woods besides a vague idea on how it might be done. However, while the concept of spinning a stick inside of another stick had been hazy, it wasn’t something Alice would have thought of before today. Was this the effect of a new environment and desperation kicking in, or was it the effect of levels?

Alice opened her status screen again, trying to look at it and see if it would provide any clues.

[Survivor] was at level 4 - hadn’t the message telling her that she had unlocked the [Survivor] class said it had to do with surviving near-death experiences? And it certainly felt like she was more proficient at dealing with the outdoors than she had been yesterday… was her ‘survivor’ class just… directly inserting information into her brain?

As far as she could tell, levels and stats didn’t seem to affect each other at all. Stats were raised by doing things related to the stat. Assuming levels actually ‘did’ something, inserting knowledge into her brain was a reasonable guess. However, this brought up different problems. If the system was directly inserting information into her brain, how the heck was that even possible? Brains were incredibly complex webs of electricity and neurons, packed together into a continuously evolving network of biology and information. Scientists had been studying human brains for years, and it was still pretty difficult to figure out exactly what was going on inside of the human brain. The process of a human having a single thought required more precise electricity than most supercomputers. The system inserting vague ideas into her brain in a way that she barely even noticed, without harming any of her ability to see or understand the world around her…

Was absolutely ridiculous. She was more willing to believe that the world’s best heart surgeon liked using sand and their toenails to perform heart surgery as their preferred tools of choice. However, reality clearly disagreed with her.

Suddenly, she had a headache. This wasn’t just stretching the rules of possibility the way the trees and animals were – this was just blatantly impossible!

Still, after several minutes of trying to figure out what the heck this actually meant, Alice finally refocused on the issue of food. She needed a fire, and it wasn’t going to make itself. And that was how she spent the next few hours trying and failing to start fire, before, eventually, falling asleep with hunger gnawing at her belly. This world sucked. At least she hadn’t gotten any weird diseases from drinking untreated water so far.

For every Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking in the world, there were probably hundreds of people who could have achieved similar heights of knowledge if they had the right questions and resources. Albert Einstein had spent many of his early years struggling to even get by before he had finally had the time and insight to begin making scientific discoveries, catapulting his position from a dropout struggling to get by in life to a world-renowned physicist that practically discovered half of the foundation of modern physics. This was because he found the thing every researcher and scientist desperately needed in order to truly make discoveries: he had found a question. Alice, upon seeing a freaking magical box quantifying her attributes, had her own question.What the heck is this unscientific thing, and how could something this absurd possibly exist? Today, the girl who, over the course of her rather short life, had always wondered if she would ever find a question and had finally found one Was lost in the woods, hungry, and a bit dehydrated. Her singularly unimpressive athletic abilities were finally coming back to haunt her. While she would have loved to explore whatever the System was and what was going on, what she needed now were more basic things - food, water, and a basic idea of where she was. She had a certain hope that if magic existed in this world, there might be a solution that was well magical, but she figured that was probably just wishful thinking. As she moved, she paid careful attention to her surroundings, looking for a single trace of anything useful. All of these trees meant that there had to be some form of water here, or at least there had been in the recent past, right? Even if all the trees were creepy and dead, if they had been dead for too long, surely they would have withered away, right? But there was nothing here. In the three hours she had been walking, she hadn't seen a single living thing besides herself, nor any hints of one. The forest was completely, eerily, unnervingly dead and silent. This made Alice more and more nervous as she walked - now that she was paying close attention to where she was going and her surroundings, everysnapwhen she crushed a branch, every squeal of surprise when she misjudged where something was in the dim moonlight and walked into it, and every clumsy step she took seemed louder. Something must have happened in this forest, and Alice didn't know anywhere near enough about the outdoors to figure it out. The only thing she had determined for sure so far was that there were an awful lot of dead trees in the area, and finding routes over/around fallen trees was a huge pain in the butt. Finally, Alice realized that she was probably an idiot for trying to find her way around this creepy forest in the middle of the night, and began trying to look for a place to lay down for the night. She hadn't seen much in the way of cover so far, and she was getting cold. After another few minutes of walking, however, she finally found something that looked vaguely promising - a huge tree trunk had fallen into a bunch of other trunks, and for whatever reason, the inside of the tree trunk seemed rotten and, more importantly, partially hollow inside. The remaining space in the tree could probably fit ten of her inside pretty easily, and the shelter looked like it would probably do an okay job of keeping the wind away. Almost gasping with relief at the thought of laying down and sleeping for a while, Alice stumbled towards the hollow tree trunk - and nearly died for her carelessness. An animal that looked like a raccoon leapt out at her. Its body was covered in horrific, bleeding pustules, and one of its legs had fallen off. Fresh blood was slowly dripping out of the wound, and it was hard to tell what color its fur had originally been. However, Alicewascertain that whatever was wrong with this thing, she wanted nothing to do with it. Alice was now wide-awake, and immediately began sprinting away at full speed, desperately trying to outrun whatever animal this thing was. Its claws still looked sharp, and Alice was pretty sure this thing had some sort of disease. Who knew whether it could infect humans too? After sprinting for a few minutes, Alice realized the animal had stopped chasing her, and fell to the ground, gasping and panting for breath. She tried her best to remain alert, looking around for any other animals, but the unnerving silence of the dead forest had returned: nothing around her moved or made a single sound, not even the rustling of leaves. There was nothing to differentiate one direction from another, and no way to see save for the moonlight. Her head started pounding, and Alice started to quickly realize something - despite the fact that her sweat hadn't cooled down yet, she was starting to feel freezing cold. She frowned, and her vision started to blur as waves of blackness started eating away at the edge of her sight. She touched her forehead with a growing sense of fear and suspicion, and confirmed that it was blazing hot. Oh crap.She had hypothesized earlier that another planet would have totally different diseases that her immune system had absolutely no defenses against, and hoped that the RPG system might somehow protect her from that, because she had no way of taking precautions against diseases right now. But less than a few hours after she got to this world, she already had a fever. Wasn't this way too fast? Was she really going to die like this? Without figuring out anything at all about how she had gotten to this world or what the System was, or even seeing magic after her status screen claimed it existed? But her eyes felt so heavy, and she was desperately trying to stay awake so that she could at least drag herself somewhere where she might have a lower chance of getting eaten while she was unconscious, but she just couldn't stay awake. Faintly, as she felt dizzier and sleepier, she faintly saw the words Through Training, you have increased an attribute! Willpower +1, Endurance+1 Then everything went black. * * * Her world was fire. Burning waves of heat and cold crashed through her body, and she felt like she was dying, like she was in hell, and it hurt it hurt ithurt ithurtithurtITHURT. The pain was endless, sweeping through her as she crawled forward, and it was as if her blood and her heart had become fire, scorching her from the inside.. She needed water, but there was nothing but fire and dead trees. She passed out from the pain only to wake up again almost instantly, the reality of the two blurring as she kept crawling, because she needed water. An eternity later, the forest had transitioned from gnarled, dead trees to living ones and suddenly there were the words from the RPG system again, telling her about something, but it didn't compare to the burning in her body. I'm going to die here, she thought, not for the first time. She wanted to cry because of the pain, but her body wouldn't produce tears anymore, and the world swam in hues of black and dribbled like oil in a canvas painting in her vision. Was this everything she would amount to on this world? She had only been here a day and she was already going to die. There was nobody nearby, and she was sure that nobody came to the creepy dead forest if there was even a civilization on this planet. Her vision was too fuzzy for her to make out her surroundings in any great detail, anyway. It was the end. Her arms collapsed, and she stopped crawling - her body didn't have the strength to move anymore, and whatever illness she had contracted seemed to be drying up her body at an unnatural rate. Every time she tried to move it felt like she was crawling through molasses, her body slow and unresponsive. She just couldn't summon the willpower to move another inch. Slowly, like a kite without wind, her body sagged into the dry, dry dirt. Her vision was swimming in and out of clarity, and the heat in her body was growing worse and worse. However, as her thoughts grew fuzzier, she swore that, for just a moment, she sawa stream of water? Alice's thoughts cleared for just a moment, and with the last gasp of strength, she desperately crawled forward. If she could cool down the heat she might be able to survive! A few minutes later, inch by horrible inch, she crawled farther, until she flopped into a small stream. Even stream might have been the wrong word - if she had been standing up, the water wouldn't have even come up to her knee, and it wasn't even wide enough for her to fully lay down in. However, right now this tiny little trickle of water represented her last hope to live. She had nothing to hold water in and no way to start a fire, so she had neither the tools nor strength to boil the water. She had to hope that there was nothing wrong with this water - if there was, she was dead. But right now, this was her one and only hope to live. With her body partially in the water, she managed to lower her face into the water and began to drink. A few minutes later, the heat and pain from the sickness came again, and the horrifying feeling of her bones and muscles being set on fire followed on its burning heels - she had the strength to scream now, but she managed to, just barely, hold the need to scream inside of her throat; if she attracted a different animal and it attacked her in this state, she would die. It was the worst pain she had ever felt in her life - now it felt as if her bones, her blood, her organs were all made of acid. However, the pain came wave after wave, and finally, she screamed in agony, no longer able to force down the pain with just mere willpower. Her voice echoed throughout the silent forest, sounding as thought a demented banshee was heralding the end of the world - the pain was so horrible that she didn't care if an animal came and attacked her anymore - dying couldn't be worse than what she was experiencing right now. Her body folded again from the pain, and this time she landed face-down in the stream. The coolness from the water didn't help the pain. However, her screaming stopped, if only because she couldn't breathe anymore. Moving more by instinct than logic at this point, her body spasmed again and she sucked in half a breath of water, before her body shuddered and began a hacking cough, which was rapidly cut short as her body ran out of oxygen. With her last shred of willpower, she managed to drag her head back out of the water and roll over, coughed out the liquid in her lungs and sucked in another breath of air as she spasmed in the little stream. The pain was unrelenting, and she screamed again, and again, and again. After an unknown period of time, her throat was raw and bloody, and her body was hot and heavy, and she managed to drink another few mouthfuls of water but couldn't cool the heat inside of her body. The sun set, and she couldn't scream any more, but the pain and acid and fire inside of her body still failed to relent. For the entire night, the pain was unrelenting, and she only managed to flop over and suck in a few mouthfuls of water a few more times - she wished she would pass out and make the pain stop for a while. Wasn't the human body supposed to stop functioning whenever pain became unbearable? But for some reason her body refused to fall unconscious. Alice could feel her brain changing, felt the weight ofsomethingsettle inside of her ribcage, behind her heart. Slowly, the horrifying heat and feeling of acid tearing away at her being started to fade away, and a feeling of comforting warmth began to build up inside of her body instead. Her limbs, by this point, had stopped flailing about, and were reduced to simply twitching in response to the pain. The fire that had consumed her body began to roll towards her heart and brain, and the pain everywhere began to fade. After a few hours the pain faded completely, leaving behind a flickering ember of warmth pulsing behind her heart. After a moment, she started to lose awareness of it as it faded away from her awareness. Alice opened her eyes, trying to remember when they had closed. When she opened her eyes, a long list of notifications from the system rang out, starting with the one she had gotten sometime yesterday while her initial fever had been kicking in and destroying her ability to process the world around her. You have gained an achievement! Outworlder Rarity: 10 You have come from another world, far from home and lost beyond the cracks of another dimension. +30% faster attribute growth for all stats below 120, +50% class experience for all main classes below level 50, +15% class experience for all secondary classes below level 10, strengthened immune system, strengthened mana adaption and resistance, increased support from the System. Baptized by Broken Mana Rarity: 6 You are one of the four percent of survivors among the ungifted who have managed to survive mana poisoning. Furthermore, you even baptized yourself using broken mana instead of regular mana. You must really love taking risks! +50% faster growth to the Magic' attribute, +25% growth to the Willpower' attribute, +30% experience gain for all mage and magic-related classes, +15% mana recovery, immunity to Mana poisoning from Broken Mana You have unlocked the classSurvivoras a result of surviving alone in the wilderness for multiple days and surviving a near-death experience. Would you like to make this class a primary class? Yes No You have unlocked the classExplorer of Magicas a result of having the achievementOutworlderandsurviving the effects of mana poisoning! Would you like to make this class a primary class? Yes No Alice spasmed, trying to process what was going on. She was alive? She was alive! What the heck had just happened? She was reasonably sure that no more than a day or two had passed while she was incredibly hungry now, it didn't seem like her body was suffering from the effects of malnutrition yet, just on the edge. In that case had she just fought off a disease from this planet in just a day or two? Maybe this was the effect of her strengthened immune system' from the {Outworlder} perk? What the heck did increased support from the System' mean? What was Mana Poisoning? Finally, she realized that the {Baptized by Broken Mana} achievement indicated that what she had just fought off wasn't actually a disease it seemed to be some sort of byproduct of mana. Was broken mana' the reason that the forest area she was in seemed so dead and lifeless? Also, what the heck was the Explorer of Magic Class supposed to do? She had no magic attribute! She pulled up her status screen, preparing to really let the System have a piece of her mind, but when it came up, several things were quite different. Name: Alice Verianna Age: 15 Strength: 44 Perception: 101 Dexterity: 47 Intelligence: 153 Endurance: 50 Willpower: 119 Charisma: 125 Magic: 5 Primary Classes: 0/5 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A Secondary Classes 0 Skills English language proficiency: 100 Achievements Outworlder Rarity: 10 Baptized by Broken Mana Rarity: 6 The first thing she noticed was that the set of glitch-signs under the skills' list was gone and had been replaced with the word English.'The system was updating its information or something?However, even though the system had apparently updated its information and figured out what the English language was, it still seemed to have no awareness of any of her other skills that she should have built up during her life. Alice also realized that even though she had checked her status screen before, there was now an {Achievements} category that had both the {Outworlder} achievement and the {Baptized by Mana} achievement. Her body was also warm... much warmer than it had been moments ago. It was subtle, but she could definitely feel it. However, bizarrely enough, enough of cooking her alive, it felt... right. She had no idea what to make of that. Finally, her Magic attribute had increased from 0' to 5.' Although it looked fairly pathetic when she realized that her other stats were all, at a bare minimum, well into the double-digit range, if her earlier endurance bonus from walking through the wilderness was any indication, all attributes could probably be improved with work and training. If she was willing to spend time exploring magic, she could probably get the stat up to a non-pathetic point eventually, although she had no idea how long it would take. She also wondered what a primary class' was, and how it was different from a secondary class. Her status screen listed primary classes as being 0/5' right now, so primary classes were obviously a limited resource, while secondary classes, as far as she could tell, might be totally unlimited in number. If that was the case, primary classes might be strengthened in some way? Of course, Alice had no clue what a class did at all, and so she had no idea whether making her two classes primary classes was a good idea or a terrible one. Finally, she closed her eyes and sighed. Screw it. She accepted both classes as primary classes and hoped she wouldn't regret this later. In this foreign world, what she needed was survival abilitynow, and Survivor sounded pretty useful for the purpose of not dying. Furthermore,Explorer of Magicsounded exactly like something she wanted to do; exploring the reality-ignoring, physics-defying nonsense that this world had to offer. Furthermore, if she could figure out how to throw fireballs, that would certainly improve her survival ability by several orders of magnitude. If this was suboptimal or somehow problematic. Well, necessity was the mother of bad decisions, and right now she needed to not die instead of optimize for a distant future. While she still didn't know for sure whether or not other humanoids lived in this world, the fact that the system had mentioned survivors' and ungifted' indicated that the answer was probably yes. However, if there were people here, they had grown up with an RPG system that, based on her understanding of it so far, allowed probably supernatural increases in body strength, mental ability, and, possibly, prevented any decay whatsoever of knowledge and skills even if they weren't used for decades. At least, that was how things worked in video games character skills never decayed or went down. Hmm the Survivor from another world' perk might be some sort of catch-up mechanism, which would explain why the benefits of the mana perk continued on into infinity while the Survivor from another world' perk stops being useful for attributes above 120. In that case, would an average inhabitant of this world have attributes of around 120? Of course, she could also just be wrong about the {Outworlder} perk being a catch-up mechanism. She had no idea how strong or weak the {Outworlder} perk was, and it might help strengthen her above, or below, the average strength of this world. Itdidhave a rarity next to it, but rarity might not necessarily correlate to how useful a perk was. She didassumethat there was probably some correlation between higher rarity and usefulness, but the {Baptized by Broken Mana} achievement seemed to give better bonuses than the Survivor from Another World' perk when it came to magic. Perhaps it was also related to the actual difficulty of gaining the achievement? Or how specific it was? She hadn't done anything besides wake up in a foreign world in order to get the Survivor achievement, but she had actively survived a difficult process in order to get the Mana achievement. Or something. She decided to put her thoughts on the matter to rest for now she had too little information, and no way to find out more. Alice sighed and took a look around. The area of the forest she had stumbled into in the middle of her mana-poisoning induced haze was much less dead than the place she had entered this world, with the occasional sounds of animals bumping into trees and even birds chirping in the distance, flagrantly ignoring the fact that biologically it should have been pretty much impossible for a totally different planet to evolve the same lifeforms andno don't think about that! Alice hurriedly snapped herself back out of the endless spiral of trying to figure out if any of this made sense at all and instead sighed in contentment. Yes, this definitely made sense. Birds in another world that produced almost the exact same sounds as birds at home. Trees. Floating letters that popped up whenever she said the words status screen' out loud. Logic? What was that? Unlike in many RPG's, there didn't seem to be a difference in stats when it came to a level zero and a level one. Come to think of it, the system hadn't known what the English language was at first, so maybe this world was bugged?' Alice gave the trees a suspicious glance. If the level system was bugged, could she get stuck in the ground or in trees? That seemed absurd, but so did a levelling system.I'll just have to hope for that one. Alice scanned her status screen again, trying to look for any changes, but besides Explorer of Magic' and Survivor' being listed as level 1' under her primary classes section, she couldn't find anything else different. She shrugged and closed her status screen - she suspected she would have plenty of time to figure out the nature of the status screens and the RPG system that governed this dimension if she didn't die, so right now she needed to get moving. The bigger question, for now, was where on Earth - ahem. Where in this dimension was she? She looked around, seeing the world clearly in sunlight for the first time. Trees and birds chirped in the sunlight, and the only landmarks she could see were the familiar patch of unnervingly dead trees in the distance and the creek she had nearly drowned in earlier. If it weren't for the status screen, she could have easily mistaken this place for Earth. If she didn't know where she was, perhaps she should just follow the creek - odds were decent that if she just followed the water far enough, she might find a river, which would hopefully eventually find civilization. Alice knew that in ancient eras rivers tended to be where most villages and early cities were founded, due to their easy access to water. Even in the modern era, it wasn't a bad bet, and it was the only landmark she had for now. She took a step forward and found that her body felt far weaker than before. That shouldn't be right, though, should it? In the first place, she had recovered from oh. Alice suddenly realized she hadn't eaten in at least a day, possibly two or three. She was very, very hungry, but had been too distracted by the pain of mana poisoning earlier, and was still trying to process what had happened afterwards, so she had lost track of time. For that matter, she doubted she was properly hydrated either. She lowered her head back into the creek, and praying that she didn't get some sort of horrible disease, noisily slurped down water until her throat stopped hurting. Then, she scanned the area around her, and tried to identify all of the plants and animals.Birds - edible, but hard to catch. I don't have any confidence in hitting one even if I throw rocks or make a basic slingshot, and they don't have much meat on them. I think while I was delirious I saw a rabbit, so I might be able to hunt one of them if I make a snare how do you make a snare? UmmAlice looked at all of the brown and red leaves of the plants around the river, and realized she had no clue what was and wasn't poisonous. In the first place, who in the modern world actually bothered learning wilderness survival? Alice was far more proficient at identifying the packages of food in a supermarket than identifying plants in a forest. Besides, the plants and animals of this planet, even if they looked like the ones on earth, had to be differentsomehow. The air here had seemed pretty normal, but she had contracted mana poisoning fromsomewhere,and besides the air she hadn't interacted with much so far. If everything in the world breathed in mana, a good chunk of the wildlife was probably evolved to either handle or use the mana in some way, right? Even if she knew how to identify plants from Earth, it might be useless here. Alice finally turned to the river itself and noticed something that filled her with hope: even though the water was somewhat shallow, lazily swimming towards the center of the river was a fish about twice the size of her hand. While it wasn't large, where there was one fish there would probably be more. Alice quickly grabbed a fallen tree branch and began tearing off the extraneous bits, and after perhaps five minutes she had in her hands the beginning of mankind's most primitive but incredibly useful hunting tool: a spear. Frowning, she poked the other end of the spear and confirmed that it was nowhere near sharp enough to be used for anything stabbing-related. Perhaps instead of calling it a spear' she should have just called it a stick. Alice began checking some of the pebbles in the area, and eventually managed to find a somewhat sharp edge on a stone that had broken in half. Turning back to her makeshift spear, she took the stone and began hitting the edge of the branch, trying to sharpen the edge of the stick into something that resembled a spear. Five minutes passed this way, with a girl mercilessly beating a stick with a rock. Ten minutes Fifteen Finally, after thirty minutes, Alice had a spear. Yes, a very powerful and mighty extremely sharp somewhat sharper than average pointy stick. Alice held it up and inspected it, and was pleasantly surprised to hear the system give her two notifications. Through training, you have increased a skill! Woodworking +1 You have leveled up! Survivor: 2 So you can recognize Woodworking and Survivor levels, but you can't recognize {pathfinding} or {trying to find civilization} or {lost in the woods and dying, please send help}? Who makes the rules for Skills? I mean, the last two would be pretty ridiculous, but I could definitely see a Skill like {Pathfinding} or {Wilderness Navigation} or something along those lines existing. Alice sighed and turned back to the river. For now, she was unlikely to find any answers. Soon, she located another fish, and began phase two of operation Avoid Starving to Death.' She stopped moving as much as possible, holding her pointy stick over the shallow stream and preparing to stab downwards. Soon, the fish began swimming closer to the side of the stream she was positioned on, lazily drifting down with the current. Closer. Closer Stab! Alice stabbed the river, perfectly missing the fish. Frightened, the fish darted away, disappearing in a flash of scales and light as it zoomed into the distance. Fuck, Alice muttered, watching dinner escape. How had she missed? The fish had been right below her pointy stick Belatedly, Alice realized the problem. The surface of the water caused light to refract slightly, meaning that anything she was looking at in the water was slightly lower than what her eyes would tell her. Since she had mistaken this, given the fact that her pointy stick wasn't entirely straight she had just barely missed the fish, instead of spearing it down the middle as she had meant to. Part of this could also be attributed to her rather low accuracy in the first place, which had exacerbated the problem, but she chose to blame it entirely on the light!If I was able to think of light refraction problems afterwards, I should have been able to remember it before. Who knows when another fish will come,thought Alice. If she had been a little less careless, she could have been cooking the fish for lunch instead of quietly cursing by the creek's side. She sighed, sitting by the creek's edge and dangling her bare feet into the water. She was so hungry Come to think of it, even if she caught a fish, how would she start a fire? Rubbing two sticks together? That was supposed to work, right? It was worth a shot. She began daydreaming of convenience stores. In America, it was incredibly easy to find food as long as one had a little bit of money. If she could just step into a convenience store or a restaurant and buy some waffles. Blueberry waffles with maple syrup sounded delicious right now She felt a pang of homesickness. Finally, after a few minutes of indulging in a pointless fantasy, Alice realized she was wasting time and stood up, trying to focus again.If I want to find food or civilization, my best bet is probably the river. I can periodically check the water to see if I can find any fish to eat, and I might also run into other small animals of prey that I have some chance of successfully hunting and killing. In addition, villages are much more likely to be established near a river, because it would make watering crops or retrieving water for drinking purposes easier. Assuming there are even humans on this planet, at least,she thought. She began following the little stream downriver, which soon joined a few other streams and started to become a properly large river. As she walked, she noticed there were plenty of other lifeforms that were bizarrely similar to Earth's flora and fauna here - although the original odds of finding humans or similar creatures on another planet should have been basically zero, this world seemed perfectly happy throwing such logic back in her face. Even though she was still hungry and cold, she was determined not to accept her death. Through training, you have increased an Attribute! Willpower +1 Alice snorted, not wanting to deal with the system right now. However, she felt as if her will had been fortified compared to a second ago - the change was slight, and Alice wasn't entirely sure that it wasn't just her imagination, but she felt as if it was easier to cling onto her beliefs and determination than it had been a few moments ago. She absently wondered if one single point in willpower actually made this large of a difference maybe this was actually just the placebo effect? But perhaps it was much easier to feel as if the point of willpower made a difference compared to all the points she had gained in endurance, due to the fact that willpower was less impacted by the fact that she hadn't eaten in over a day and was physically exhausted. Finally, Alice found more fish in the river. Problematically, they also swam much farther beneath the water's surface-Alice could barely even see the deepest fish. If she fell into the river at this point, she could easily be carried off by the current and drown, meaning that this was actually a risky endeavor. Alice began by finding a shallower part of the river where her pointy stick could reach the bottom. Then, she gathered several sticks that could be used as kindling and a few thicker sticks that could be used to sustain a fire for a longer period of time. Then, she patiently lowered the spear' into the water, making sure that light refraction would no longer be a problem. Afterwards, she waited patiently, ignoring the rumbling of her stomach. Finally, a fish wandered underneath the pointy stick.Stab! You have leveled up! Survivor: 4 With a single stab, Alice gained two levels and a weakly struggling fish. She lifted the stick out of the water, careful not to let the thrashing fish slide off the stick in the process, and then quickly strode back over to the pile of sticks. Then, she grabbed a stick and began rubbing it against another stick, hoping to cause enough friction to start a fire. After only a moment, though, she suddenly felt as if her preparations were somehow insufficient. She frowned, trying to figure out where this idea was coming from, before finding a stick that had a hole in it and another stick that was around the same size as the hole. She placed one of the sticks into the other and began spinning the stick, trying to make the force of friction start the fire. Bizarrely enough, she felt that her first idea of just rubbing two sticks together would be harder than this method. Five minutes later, her arms felt like they were going to fall off. Aside from that, no real progress had been made. Alice was starting to worry that she wouldn't be able to get anywhere with this, either because she was doing it wrong or because her arms simply couldn't provide sufficient force to the sticks to actually cause a fire. She finally set down the sticks and flopped onto the dirt for a while, panting as she pondered whether this was what dying felt like. She didn't have any way to gut or descale the fish, she couldn't start a fire even though she had caught the fish, she didn't have the ability to process it! If she died like this right after successfully spearing her first fish, she would curse this planet on the way to the afterlife and then make an appeal to Darwin to fix the obviously broken process of natural selection here! Finally, Alice remembered something critical - theoretically, she had magic. Extremely questionable magic that she had no idea how to use, but maybe she could start a fire with magic somehow? She closed her eyes, trying to figure out how to use magic. In most novels, magic had a lot to do with imagination, so she tried imagining flames as much as she could, imagining the stick catching fire After ten minutes of concentrating, she felt incredibly stupid, and exactly zero progress towards starting a fire had been made. Apart from that, she just felt tired, hungry, and frustrated. At least the fish had stopped flopping around. Alice stuck her face into the river and took a long drink of water - even though she should purify it somehow, perhaps by boiling it, she had no water container and no clue how to make a container here. And even if she did, she had no fire anyway. If she got a disease from the water and died, it would be pretty typical of her luck thus far, and she was thirsty enough that she could barely think. If she was going to die either way, she may as well just go for it and pray, right? She eyed the dead fish. Was she desperate enough to just bite into it and hope for the best? Not quite. Yet. Finally, she thought back to earlier, when she had been trying to start a fire. She had initially been planning on rubbing two sticks together and hoping for the best, but right before she started she had suddenly had the hazy idea of trying to spin a stick inside of another stick in order to start a fire instead. In the end, she failed, but she had no clue how to start a fire in the woods besides a vague idea on how it might be done. However, while the concept of spinning a stick inside of another stick had been hazy, it wasn't something Alice would have thought of before today. Was this the effect of a new environment and desperation kicking in, or was it the effect of levels? Alice opened her status screen again, trying to look at it and see if it would provide any clues. Name: Alice Verianna Age: 15 Strength: 44 Perception: 101 Dexterity: 47 Intelligence: 153 Endurance: 50 Willpower: 120 Charisma: 125 Magic: 5 Primary Classes: 2/5 Survivor: 4 Explorer of Magic: 1 N/A N/A N/A Secondary Classes 0 Skills English language proficiency: 100 Woodworking: 1 Achievements Outworlder Rarity: 10 Baptized by Broken Mana Rarity: 6 Survivor was at level 4 - hadn't the message telling her that she had unlocked the Survivor class said it had to do with surviving near-death experiences? And it certainly felt like she was more proficient at dealing with the outdoors than she had been yesterday was her survivor' class just directly inserting information into her brain? As far as she could tell, levels and stats didn't seem to affect each other at all. Stats were raised by doing things related to the stat. Assuming levels actually did' something, inserting knowledge into her brain was a reasonable guess. However, this brought up different problems. If the system was directly inserting information into her brain, how the heck wasthateven possible? Brains were incredibly complex webs of electricity and neurons, packed together into a continuously evolving network of biology and information. Scientists had been studying human brains for years, and it was still pretty difficult to figure outexactlywhat was going on inside of the human brain. The process of a human having a single thought required more precise electricity than most supercomputers. The system inserting vague ideas into her brain in a way that she barely evennoticed, without harming any of her ability to see or understand the world around her Was absolutely ridiculous. She was more willing to believe that the world's best heart surgeon liked using sand and their toenails to perform heart surgery as their preferred tools of choice. However, reality clearly disagreed with her. Suddenly, she had a headache. This wasn't juststretchingthe rules of possibility the way the trees and animals were this was just blatantly impossible! Still, after several minutes of trying to figure out what the heck this actuallymeant,Alice finally refocused on the issue of food. She needed a fire, and it wasn't going to make itself. And that was how she spent the next few hours trying and failing to start fire, before, eventually, falling asleep with hunger gnawing at her belly. This worldsucked. At least she hadn't gotten any weird diseases from drinking untreated water so far.